While it wasn’t the cottage of her dreams, our writer nonetheless found more fun than she ever could have imagined at her new vacation spot.

By Jennifer Keirn

He asked me to keep an open mind.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard those words from my husband. I’ve learned that they’re associated with danger. A home improvement I’d been dreading, the move from our beloved first home, a purchase I considered to be frivolous — all of these started with an exhortation to keep an open mind.

But when he uttered those words in the summer of 2014, I got a pleasant surprise.

He’d discovered a little place on Lake Erie at a great price in a community where several people we knew already spent their summer weekends. It was only 45 minutes away from our home, making it easy to spend just a day or two for those times when life’s busyness precludes a full weekend’s retreat. It was just steps away from the water with a small beach accessible only to residents.

It was incredible news. As a kid, I spent my weekends boating on the Ohio River near Cincinnati where I grew up, and the idea of a place right on the lake was almost too good to be true. Could this be a first step toward wearing down his resistance to getting a boat?

My husband studied my face. He could see exactly where my mind was heading.

“Lower your expectations,” he warned. “It’s in really bad shape.”

No problem, I thought — it would be fun to rehab a little fixer-upper lake cottage. We’d paint the walls and plant flowers in between grilling steaks with friends, watching the sunset from our beach and kayaking in the morning’s still waters.

“No, really,” he said again. “It’s really, really bad.”

It was a lake house. How bad could it be?

It was bad. Really, really bad.

That little fixer-upper cottage I’d envisioned turned out to be a dilapidated single-wide trailer in a 65-year-old lakefront trailer park. One late summer Sunday, we drove up with friends for a visit to a long, narrow, 5-acre plot sandwiched between agricultural properties on a quiet stretch of Cleveland Road between Huron and Vermilion in western Ohio.

Our friends had already inked a deal on a trailer right next door to the one we were visiting. Theirs had been vacant for years and the prior owner wasn’t paying dues. The owner of the park was so desperate for a paying tenant that when our friend said, “we’ll give you a hundred dollars for it,” she agreed.

Red flag.

We pulled into the park to find 40 trailers in a wide range of conditions. Many were neatly kept, with flowerbeds surrounding wooden decks, American flags flapping in the lakefront breeze and Adirondack chairs sunning themselves in the yard.

Others were in various stages of disrepair — aluminum siding streaked with mold and held together with rusty bolts, decks made of wood bulging with moisture and leaning precariously, and perimeters clogged with a year’s worth of weeds and fallen leaves.

Yep, ours was one of those.

We were let in by a neighbor. The 90-year-old owner of the unit had recently died after spending summer weekends there for more than 40 years. It was a dark cave lined with brown wall paneling and threadbare brown and green carpet, with braided rugs covering the trail of wear. The family had left behind sagging furnishings, dust-laden dishes and detritus of lake summers — old fishing poles and nets, boxes of crumbling shell collections and nautical-themed lighting fixtures nearly falling off the walls. A pair of the previous owner’s shoes, thick with dust, were still tucked neatly under the bed.

The windows had been leaking for years. The subfloors below each were spongy, and we later found mold behind the wall paneling. There had been a leaky roof in this trailer’s past too; a large patch of brown water stains blossomed out from the bedroom’s overhead light fixture. The refrigerator worked, but was spotted with mold inside.

But it was what came next that made all the difference. Just 100 yards from our doorstep, a grassy slope opened up to a nearly-180-degree view of Lake Erie. Friendly neighbors sat around a lakefront fire pit in folding chairs, laughing and playing cornhole.

We walked down a flight of stairs to find a large wooden deck open to all residents, then a few more steps to the shore, consisting of a concrete seawall and a sandy shallow beach. A jetty of rocks divided the two, where my two sons quickly — and delightedly — discovered water snakes hiding. A resident’s paddleboard was parked on the beach, with a boat anchored a few hundred yards off shore.

Suddenly the soggy subfloor and water-stained ceilings didn’t seem so bad. That lake view made it possible for me to envision the potential that would come along with a full dumpster, a good cleaning, fresh paint and new floors. I could see myself taking a cup of tea and a book to the lakefront deck each morning, kayaking at sunset and playing on the beach with my kids.

My mind was opened, and we decided to plunk down $2,000 for a trailer that we quickly but affectionately named “The Shithole.”

We spent the entire summer of 2015 bringing The Shithole into livable condition, gutting the contents, replacing the windows, siding and subfloor to stop the leaking, and brightening the interior with fresh paint and laminate floors.

This summer began with another fresh list of chores — redoing the bathroom, repairing our sagging front porch and adding new flowerbeds. But we’re also leaving time for fun, taking the kayaks out in the cool of the morning and tooling around on our newly purchased jet ski in the steamy summer afternoons. Our friends next door are still knee-deep in their own renovations, but we relax together after a day of work to grill out, walk to the water to watch the sunset and make fires on the beach with our kids.

The trailer is a technology-free zone — no mobile devices, computer or TV — so our kids are constantly inventing new ways to entertain themselves, like target shooting with their BB guns or watching the snakes along the shore.

We no longer call it The Shithole, but it isn’t the lake house I had envisioned. It never will be. And that’s okay with me.

Today, when we invite friends to visit, I consider calling our little place the “lake house” or “cottage.” But I always decide in the end to shoot them straight: “It’s a trailer. But keep an open mind.”